LABOR: Holy Crusade

The shirt-sleeved audience sweltering in the
frowzy, faded yellow hall on Atlanta's Ivy Street included labor
leaders from Texas oil fields, Alabama steel furnaces, North Carolina
textile mills. They had gathered to be knighted for a new crusade. Up
rose portly, grizzled Van Bittner, 61-year-old veteran organizer and
director of the C.I.O.'s drive to unionize the South, to make the
dedication:

"Every well-thinking man and woman will join in this holy crusade. . . .
C.I.O. is not going to invade the South. The South is coming to us. . . .
The day has gone by when the working men...